The Avenger 14 - Three Gold Crowns (8 page)

“We ought to have something more on Cleeves or Salloway or Beall soon,” was all he said. “My men are working on them right now.”

But they were not going to get anything on Salloway.

Smitty was on Salloway, trailing him if he went anywhere, watching what he did and to whom he talked.

Above all, he was trying to get his hands on the cigar case Salloway was said always to have on his person, in which it was said he carried the trumped-up murder clue against Farquar.

Smitty had had no luck so far. He’d found out nothing suspicious about the well-known contractor.

He was in a stairway at the moment.

Salloway lived on the fourteenth floor of an East River apartment building. He had a home in Connecticut, where his family and servants stayed; he himself used this four-room bachelor apartment when he was in New York.

All last night Smitty had lurked on the stairway just the other side of the fourteenth-floor door, ready to trail Salloway if he came out, ready to eavesdrop if anyone went in. But neither had happened.

The giant was sleepy. He had taken several cat naps in early morning, propped against a stair, trusting to his hearing to wake him if sounds of steps down the hall indicated movement at Salloway’s door. But that was all. Now, in the middle of the morning, he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.

Throughout, he had stood ready to step into the four-teenth-floor corridor on the rare occasions when anyone used the stairs. He was pretty sure no one knew of his all-night vigil.

But he was so sleepy—

Smitty’s head jerked up on his drooping neck muscles. There had been a step outside the stair door, in the hall.

There had been frequent steps there as tenants of other apartments came and went. He opened the door a crack to see if this was just another.

He just caught the movement of a door closing down the line. And it was Salloway’s door.

Smitty went to the door. The mountain of a man moved as silently, almost, as the wraithlike Avenger himself.

Yet he moved fast. The door hadn’t been closed more than thirty seconds when he reached it.

He listened. He heard a voice call out something but couldn’t catch what was said. He tried the knob.

The door was not locked. It had not been closed tightly enough for the automatic latch to catch.

The giant’s eyes looked puzzled—and more than that. It didn’t take much of a slam to close doors of this type. The fact that the door had been closed so lightly that the catch hadn’t worked hinted that whoever had entered had tried very hard to avoid the slightest noise.

Smitty pushed open the door, ready to duck or fight. But he opened the door on an empty room.

It was a large living room, expensively furnished, bare of occupants. Smitty crossed the room toward another door, and midway he heard a groan!

It was more a hard exhalation of breath than an actual groan. But it acted like a knife stuck in him.

He crossed to the door in two long jumps, swung that open—and went to his knees as three men in a group slammed into him!

A fourth man lay on the floor.

A hard grin formed on Smitty’s lips. The giant had been framed into a jail sentence, once, by a crook. It was that episode which had made him devote his life to other criminals, working under the genius of The Avenger. Now he lived to get his hands on the rats in human form who make up the world’s underworld element.

And here were three of them confidently barging in to give him just such an opportunity. It was, Smitty decided, perfect.

He had been knocked to his knees. Gun butts and barrels were clubbing at him from all directions, it seemed. But they were only lighting glancingly on his ponderous left forearm, thrown up to protect head and face.

His right arm contracted and lashed forward.

His fist clubbed past the jaw of one of the three men glancingly, or it would have broken the neck behind the jaw. But that touch of power was enough. The jaw’s owner went back four steps and tripped over the body on the floor.

Then Smitty got a wrist behind a swinging gun. He twisted, not much, and the man dropped the gun and screamed. That was after there had been a muffled snap as bone gave way. The third man wanted to run, but there was no place to run. Smitty was in the doorway.

Smitty started for him—and a voice behind him said: “Put your hands up! And keep ’em up!”

Smitty turned, raging. He’d had things so completely his own way, till now.

A well-dressed man stood in the middle of the living room. He held a gun on Smitty, and the gun was trembling in his excited hands till the giant felt cold chills constrict his stomach.

“Who are you?” he rasped.

“The building manager,” said the man. “No, you don’t! Keep those hands up!”

“Turn your gun the other way,” said Smitty. “Keep it on these three men behind me. They broke in here and—”

The three men filed past him into the living room, with the manager uncertain as to where to point. One of the three was all right. Another had a blue swelling on his jaw. The third held a broken right wrist.

“Keep him covered!” snapped the uninjured one, jerking his head at Smitty. “We came to visit our friend Salloway, and this guy broke in and tried to hold us all up.”

“Why, you cockeyed liar!” raged Smitty. “You”

“Don’t you move!” squealed the manager.

The gun was trembling, and the trigger must have been within a hair of being pulled in the man’s agitated clasp. And the gun was pointing at Smitty’s head, not at his body, where the celluglass garment would stop the bullet.

“Hold him here,” said the man. “My friends and I will go out and get the police, and then go on to some doctor’s office. That big killer hurt two of us pretty badly.”

“Surely,” said Smitty to the manager, “you’re not fool enough to believe”

“You stand perfectly still—and keep your hands up!” squeaked the manager. “All right, you three, get the police here as soon as you can. I’ll keep him covered.”

“Why, damn it—” bellowed Smitty. Then he stopped. There was no arguing with the man; he was crazy with fear.

He had to watch, gnashing his teeth in impotent rage, while the three left. And then he relaxed. His chance to capture the three had gone.

“You’re going to have a lot of fun explaining to the police why you let three murderers get away,” he said.

“You’re the m-murderer, if there’s been any murdering done.”

“I think there has been,” said the giant. “There’s a man in that bedroom lying awfully still.”

“Salloway, you mean?” The manager took a step toward the door, then stopped with a cunning look in his eyes. “You just want me to get near enough so you can jump at me. I’ll wait till the police come.”

But they didn’t come. Half an hour passed, and still they didn’t show up. Even the manager got it through his head that the men who had left had assuredly not notified the police, and he let his shaking gun sag out of line of Smitty’s skull.

As it would do no good at that late stage of the game to throttle the dope, Smitty let him alone. He picked up the phone and called Bleek Street Then, after speaking with Benson, who had just returned from Farquar’s office, Smitty telephoned the police.

And the building manager tried to stutter his way out of his mule-headed mess.

The Avenger, as was to be expected, reached the apartment long before the police did. The cops could move fast, but Dick Benson could move faster.

He came into the place, seeming to glide like a black panther in a hurry rather than a man. He paid absolutely no attention to the numbed building manager; The Avenger had a sort of sixth sense telling him when people did or did not count in the scheme of things.

He went directly to the other room, with Smitty on his heels.

This next room was a bedroom. In it there was a double bed, a dresser and highboy, and several chairs.

And a corpse.

The body lay next to the dresser, and it was clad in pajamas. It was Salloway, the tenant of the place, all right. The wealthy contractor was sprawled on his face; and from his back, between the shoulder blades, stuck up the handles of a pair of shears.

Someone had grabbed the shears from dresser or highboy and jammed them into the man’s back. Chances were he never knew what hit him.

“They must have done it just as I stepped in the door,” said Smitty. “I heard a kind of groan about that time.”

Dick Benson nodded. That thick black hair of his made his pale eyes seem even more colorless in contrast. They were brilliant agates now, as he looked at the dead man and the room.

“Almost noon,” he said, “and Salloway was here, in night clothes. It looks as if he had been staying very close to home lately. Afraid of just this, perhaps.”

He did not mention the thing that both he and the giant Smitty were thinking of.

The cigar case supposed never to leave his person.

In the cigar case, Farquar had been sure, was the fake murder clue Salloway was holding over the lawyer’s head. But one doesn’t carry cigar cases in pajama pockets. At least there was none in the single pocket of the dead man’s pajamas jacket. A glance told that.

Salloway’s fists were clenched hard. The Avenger bent down and opened the right hand. It took a bit of effort.

“You can’t do that!” bleated the house manager. “The police— No one is supposed to touch”

“Pipe down!” growled Smitty, “or you may get into even more trouble than I think you’re due for.”

The manager shut up. Dick saw that the right hand contained nothing; so he opened the left. And this did reveal something.

A queer-looking key.

It had a curved flange instead of a straight one and had more indentations than most keys. It evidently fit into a very complicated lock.

But
what
lock?

“Did Salloway have a strongbox or small safe installed in here since his occupancy?” Benson asked the building manager.

He got no reply.

“You’d know of such an installation, as manager here,” Dick said.

Still the man’s lips were obstinately sealed. And then he gasped suddenly.

Two hands like steel vises were on his cringing shoulders. Pale eyes like the eyes of Death itself glared into his.

“Well?”

Dick’s voice was almost gentle, but by now the luckless manager was shaking all over and his forehead was dewed with sweat. It was a frightening thing to look into The Avenger’s eyes when he was coldly annoyed.

“Y-yes,” he said, moistening dry lips. “Behind that dresser, I think.”

Dick pulled the dreser from the wall. The wall seemed unbroken, but tapping produced a hollow note. He pressed on an area where several slight smudges told of other finger-pressures, and a section swung out. It revealed a steel box front like that of a safe, but with a bent slot for a key instead of a combination knob.

Dick inserted the odd key, and the box opened. There were no papers, money, or other standard valuables there. It held only one thing—a silver cigar case.

As The Avenger picked it up, something rattled—something like a pebble in the case.

He started to open it, and nine men poured into the room like water pouring through a pipe!

It had been well done. The men must have literally held their breaths as they crept in from the hall and crossed the living room. Otherwise, The Avenger would have heard them. As it was, he’d have heard even the rustle of their clothes, with those keen ears of is, if he hadn’t been so intent on the cigar case.

But he hadn’t heard, and here they were, flying at him and at Smitty like so many leaping cats.

The cigar case went into a pocket, and Benson went behind the dresser he had pulled out from the wall. Two men slammed into the dresser as they tried to change their course and couldn’t quite make it.

And then the quaking building manager saw a sight that made his eyes bulge out.

Dick Benson was only average in size and weight. Not at all a big man. But now and then men appear whose muscle seems to have three times the strength of ordinary muscle. And Dick was one of these.

At any rate, the manager saw this average-sized man raise the big piece of furniture a foot off the floor, with the two men still draped over it so that over half their weight was lifted, too. Then he saw the man with the pale eyes half thrust and half throw dresser and men and everything else, with a furious burst of power. The tangled mess slammed into some more of the men four feet away and sent the whole group to the floor.

After that, the manager saw only a whirling kaleidoscope of movement as he shivered in a corner.

The three who had raced out when Smitty interrupted them had come back with these six more—to get that cigar case. That was evident. And they were certainly trying, now.

They couldn’t shoot, because there were so many in the room they’d have fired at each other. But nine to two, they must have thought, were odds enough to insure success.

That thought was soon altered.

Dick Benson followed the powerful thrust of the dresser with a flashing charge at the men. One, already up, got a blow to the jaw as scientifically administered as an anesthetic, and acting in the same manner. He crumpled and fell. Another, lunging for Dick’s knees, felt iron fingers press at the back of his neck in a nerve pressure—and then didn’t feel anything else. For that, too, could act as an anesthetic, putting a man out for half an hour.